"I have found when you confront people and say 'excuse me, you just dropped this', nine times out of 10, you might be unlucky on the 10th one, but nine times out of 10 they will say 'oh, sorry,' and they will take it away," he says.

"It's a beautiful country and I just don't understand why people want to make it full of shit," the presenter says during a BBC One Panorama programme on rubbish called Our Dirty Nation, which is due to be broadcast on Monday night.

Some might suggest that telling people off in the street is a more successful tactic if you are an instantly recognisable TV personality with a bulldog reputation for tearing strips of miscreant politicians – but it is a theme Paxman has warmed to before.

In a piece for the Guardian in 2007 he wrote: "It tells us something about the sort of nation we have become. People, like animals, do not generally foul their own nests. But they feel free to throw rubbish around for much the same reason morons feel entitled to vandalise bus shelters, smash park benches or use telephone boxes as urinals: they do not feel the public realm is theirs."

He warned that the UK is "sliding downhill into a country that increasingly resembles some vast municipal landfill site … Right now, Britain looks pretty vile in many places. Wait five years and see how it looks."

We're now six years on. Have things got worse or better? And what should we do about it? Do you challenge people in the street when they drop litter? And if so what sort of reaction do you get? Is it our civic duty to ask people to pick up their rubbish?